Wilhelm Meister S Apprenticeship - Bartleby

Criticisms and InterpretationsII. By Thomas CarlyleA WIDE, and every way most important, interval divides “Werther,” with its skeptical philosophy, and“hypochondriacal crotchets,” from Goethe’s next novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”, publishedsome twenty years afterwards. This work belongs, in all senses, to the second and sounder period ofGoethe’s life, and may indeed serve as the fullest, if perhaps not the purest, impress of it; being writtenwith due forethought, at various times, during a period of no less than ten years. Considered as a piece ofArt, there were much to be said on “Meister”; all which, however, lies beyond our present purpose. Weare here looking at the work chiefly as a document for the writer’s history; and in this point of view, itcertainly seems, as contrasted with its more popular precursor, to deserve our best attention: for theproblem which had been stated in “Werther,” with despair of its solution, is here solved. The loftyenthusiasm, which, wandering wildly over the universe, found no resting place, has here reached itsappointed home; and lives in harmony with what long appeared to threaten it with annihilation. Anarchyhas now become Peace; the once gloomy and perturbed spirit is now serene, cheerfully vigorous, and richin good fruits. Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been attained by a surrender toNecessity, or any compact with Delusion; a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment will ofthemselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no blessing, since even continued battle is better thandestruction or captivity; and peace of this sort is like that of Galgacus’s Romans, who “called it peacewhen they had made a desert.” Here the ardent, high-aspiring youth has grown into the calmest man, yetwith increase and not loss of ardor, and with aspirations higher as well as clearer. For he has conqueredhis unbelief; the Ideal has been built on the actual; no longer floats vaguely in darkness and regions ofdreams, but rests in light, on the firm ground of human interest and business, as in its true scene, on itstrue basis.It is wonderful to see with what softness the skepticism of Jarno, the commercial spirit of Werner, thereposing, polished manhood of Lothario and the Uncle, the unearthly enthusiasm of the Harper, the gay,animal vivacity of Philina, the mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon, are blended togetherin this work; how justice is done to each, how each lives freely in his proper element, in his proper form;and how, as Wilhelm himself, the mild-hearted, all-hoping, all-believing Wilhelm, struggles forwardtowards his world of Art through these curiously complected influences, all this unites itself into amultifarious, yet so harmonious Whole, as into a clear poetic mirror, where man’s life and business inthis age, his passions and purposes, the highest equally with the lowest, are imaged back to us inbeautiful significance. Poetry and Prose are no longer at variance, for the poet’s eyes are opened: he seesthe changes of many-colored existence, and sees the loveliness and deep purport which lies hidden underthe very meanest of them; hidden to the vulgar sight, but clear to the poet’s; because the “open secret” isno longer a secret to him, and he knows that the Universe is full of goodness; that whatever has being hasbeauty.—From “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays” (1828).

Criticisms and InterpretationsIII. By Sir J. R. SeeleyIT is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister” seems to make Art the one object of life; but this is notGoethe’s intention. He was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, artnaturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists, but the realsubject of it, as I hold, is vocations in general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background,and we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents the pietistic view of life; thenTherese appears in contrast, representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits the goldenmean, being practical like Therese, but less utilitarian, and ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but lessintrospective. On the whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to our lives bydevoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Naturethrough the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that ofthe satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as agenius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sortof tender consideration that is conceded to genius. But we shall find much more unity in “Wilhelm Meister” if we regard it not as a theatrical novel, but asa novel of culture and education, and if we consider it in close connexion with Goethe’s Life. The storyof Mignon, as we have remarked, expresses that yearning after the ancient world, which was perhaps thedeepest of all his feelings. The devotion to Shakspeare was his strongest feeling at a particular period ofhis life, the period when he undertook “Wilhelm Meister.” That it should disappear at a particular pointof the novel, answers to that change in his views on which we have enlarged and which is represented inhis life by his Italian journey. The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul taken together with the philosophy ofthe Uncle and his Hall of the Past, represent the struggle which went on in Goethe’s mind through thegreater part of his life between two forms of religion, between certain Christian ideas from which hewould never consent to part, and a sort of Heathenism which at times he avowed with the utmostfrankness. And all this various material he has united in “Wilhelm Meister” by means of his practicalphilosophy of culture, which taught him that a man should study to develop all that is in him, that a manshould spare no pains to discover his true vocation, and that in doing so he will receive little help fromthe reigning system of education, which excites wishes instead of awakening aptitudes. Looked at then inthis way, the book sets before us more fully than any other book of Goethe’s, and in a highly remarkable,if not a perfectly satisfactory way, what we may call the Goethian philosophy of culture.—From “GoetheReviewed after Sixty Years” (1894).

Criticisms and InterpretationsIV. By Edward DowdenIT is a novel without a hero. When William first appears in this pseudo-epos, 1 we see him as a kind oftamer, less attractive Werther; less imaginative than Werther, less of a poet, but like Werther vague,unpractical, self-involved, indulging to excess a shallower sensibility and a poorer kind of passion. Howhe came by the name of Meister was unknown to Goethe, for his right name was WilhelmSchüler. 2 William must start from low beginnings. He has small sense of his duties to others; he wasteshimself in dreams of little profit; and it is out of such stuff as this that a worthy, useful, even admirableman is to be formed. It is enough at first if there lies within him the capacity of growth, the possibility ofprogress. But the way is long: delusions, snares, wanderings must be experienced; by error he must bedelivered from error. In “Werther” Goethe had exhibited the ruin that comes upon an idealist who willnot and cannot abandon his dreams and immoderate desire. In “Tasso” he had shown how a masculineprudence, an enlightened worldliness—presented in the person of Antonio—may come to the aid anddeliverance of the idealist when he cannot deliver himself. 3 Here in “Wilhelm Meister” a foolishdreamer is to be formed into a true man; the vague and void of indefinite idealism is to be filled hereafterby a life of well-chosen, well-defined activity. He is to be educated not in the schools—it is nowunhappily too late for that—but by the harder discipline of life; he is to be delivered from the splendidprison painted with idle visions into the liberty of modest well-doing.—From “New Studies inLiterature” (1895).Translator’s PrefaceTO THE FIRST EDITION OF MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP [Edinburgh, 1824]WHETHER 4 it be that the quantity of genius among ourselves and the French, and the number of worksmore lasting than brass produced by it, have of late been so considerable as to make us independent ofadditional supplies; or that, in our ancient aristocracy of intellect, we disdain to be assisted by theGermans, whom, by a species of second-sight, we have discovered, before knowing any thing aboutthem, to be a tumid, dreaming, extravagant, insane race of mortals; certain it is, that hitherto our literaryintercourse with that nation has been very slight and precarious. After a brief period of not too judiciouscordiality, the acquaintance on our part was altogether dropped: nor, in the few years since we partiallyresumed it, have our feelings of affection or esteem been materially increased. Our translators areunfortunate in their selection or execution, or the public is tasteless and absurd in its demands; for, withscarcely more than one or two exceptions, the best works of Germany have lain neglected, or worse thanneglected, and the Germans are yet utterly unknown to us. Kotzebue still lives in our minds as therepresentative of a nation that despises him; Schiller is chiefly known to us by the monstrous productionof his boyhood; and Klopstock by a hacked and mangled image of his “Messias,” in which a beautifulpoem is distorted into a theosophic rhapsody, and the brother of Virgil and Racine ranks little higher thanthe author of Meditations among the Tombs.But of all these people there is none that has been more unjustly dealt with than Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe. For half a century the admiration, we might almost say the idol of his countrymen, to us he is

still a stranger. His name, long echoed and reëchoed through reviews and magazines, has becomefamiliar to our ears: but it is a sound and nothing more; it excites no definite idea in almost any mind. Tosuch as know him by the faint and garbled version of his “Werther,” Goethe figures as a sort of poeticHeraclitus; some woe-begone hypochondriac, whose eyes are overflowing with perpetual tears, whoselong life has been spent in melting into ecstasy at the sight of waterfalls, and clouds, and the moralsublime, or dissolving into hysterical wailings over hapless love-stories and the miseries of human life.They are not aware that Goethe smiles at this performance of his youth; or that the German Werther, withall his faults, is a very different person from his English namesake; that his Sorrows are in the originalrecorded in a tone of strength and sarcastic emphasis, of which the other offers no vestige, andintermingled with touches of powerful thought, glimpses of a philosophy deep as it is bitter, which oursagacious translator has seen proper wholly to omit. Others again, who have fallen in with Retzsch’s“Outlines” and the extracts from “Faust,” consider Goethe as a wild mystic, a dealer in demonology andosteology, who draws attention by the aid of skeletons and evil spirits, whose excellence it is to beextravagant, whose chief aim it is to do what no one but himself has tried. The tyro in German may tellus that the charm of “Faust” is altogether unconnected with its preternatural import; that the workdelineates the fate of human enthusiasm struggling against doubts and errors from within, againstscepticism, contempt and selfishness from without; and that the witchcraft and magic, intended merely asa shadowy frame for so complex and mysterious a picture of the moral world and the human soul, areintroduced for the purpose not so much of being trembled at as laughed at. The voice of the tyro is notlistened to; our indolence takes part with our ignorance; “Faust” continues to be called a monster; andGoethe is regarded as a man of “some genius,” which he has perverted to produce all manner ofmisfashioned prodigies; things false, abortive, formless, Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire.Now, it must no doubt be granted, that so long as our invaluable constitution is preserved in its pristinepurity, the British nation may exist in a state of comparative prosperity with very inadequate ideas ofGoethe: but, at the same time, the present arrangement is an evil in its kind; slight, it is true, and easy tobe borne, yet still more easy to be remedied, and which therefore ought to have been remedied ere now.Minds like Goethe’s are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should havecorrect impressions of them.It is partly with the view of doing something to supply this want, that “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” isnow presented to the English public. Written in its Author’s forty-fifth year, embracing hints ordisquisitions on almost every leading point in life and literature, it affords us a more distinct view of hismatured genius, his manner of thought and favourite subjects, than any of his other works. Nor is itGoethe alone whom it portrays; the prevailing taste of Germany is likewise indicated by it. Since the year1795, when it first appeared at Berlin, numerous editions of “Meister” have been printed: critics of allranks, and some of them dissenting widely from its doctrines, have loaded it with encomiums; its songsand poems are familiar to every German ear; the people read it, and speak of it, with an admirationapproaching in many cases to enthusiasm.That it will be equally successful in England, I am far indeed from anticipating. Apart from the aboveconsiderations, from the curiosity, intelligent or idle, which it may awaken, the number of admiring, oreven approving judges it will find can scarcely fail of being very limited. To the great mass of readers,who read to drive away the tedium of mental vacancy, employing the crude phantasmagoria of a modernnovel, as their grandfathers employed tobacco and diluted brandy, “Wilhelm Meister” will appearbeyond endurance weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. Those, in particular, who take delight in “KingCambyses’ vein.” and open “Meister” with the thought of “Werther” in their minds, will soon pause in

utter dismay, and their paroxysm of dismay will pass by degrees into unspeakable contempt. Of romanceinterest there is next to none in “Meister”; the characters are samples to judge of, rather than persons tolove or hate; the incidents are contrived for other objects than moving or affrighting us; the hero is amilksop, whom, with all his gifts, it takes an effort to avoid despising. The author himself, far from“doing it in a passion,” wears a face of the most still indifference throughout the whole affair; often it iseven wrinkled by a slight sardonic grin. For the friends of the sublime, then, for those who cannot dowithout heroical sentiments and “moving accidents by flood and field,” there is nothing here that can beof any service.Nor among readers of a far higher character can it be expected that many will take the praiseworthypains of Germans, reverential of their favourite author, and anxious to hunt out his most elusive charms.Few among us will disturb themselves about the allegories and typical allusions of the work; will stop toinquire whether it includes a remote emblem of human culture, or includes no such matter; whether thisis a light airy sketch of the development of man in all his endowments and faculties, graduallyproceeding from the first rude exhibitions of puppets and mountebanks, through the perfection of poeticand dramatic art, up to the unfolding of the principle of religion, and the greatest of all arts, the art oflife,—or is nothing more than a bungled piece of patch-work, presenting in the shape of a novel muchthat should have been suppressed entirely, or at least given out by way of lecture. Whether the charactersdo or do not represent distinct classes of men, including various stages of human nature, from the gaymaterial vivacity of Philina to the severe moral grandeur of the Uncle and the splendid accomplishmentof Lothario, will to most of us be of small importance: and the everlasting disquisitions about plays andplayers, and politeness and activity, and art and nature, will weary many a mind that knows not andheeds not whether they are true or false. Yet every man’s judgment is, in this free country, a lamp tohimself; whoever is displeased will censure; and many, it is to be feared, will insist on judging “Meister”by the common rule, and what is worse, condemning it, let Schlegel bawl as loudly as he pleases. “Tojudge,” says he, “of this book,—new and peculiar as it is, and only to be understood and learned fromitself,—by our common notion of the novel, a notion pieced together and produced out of custom andbelief, out of accidental and arbitrary requisitions,—is as if a child should grasp at the moon and stars,and insist on packing them into its toy-box,” 5 Unhappily, the most of us have boxes; and some of themare very small!Yet, independently of these its more recondite and dubious qualities, there are beauties in “Meister”which cannot but secure it some degree of favour at the hands of many. The philosophical discussions itcontains; its keen glances into life and art; the minute and skilful delineation of men; the lively genuineexhibition of the scenes they move in; the occasional touches of eloquence and tenderness, and even ofpoetry, the very essence of poetry; the quantity of thought and knowledge embodied in a style so rich ingeneral felicities, of which, at least, the new and sometimes exquisitely happy metaphors have beenpreserved,—cannot wholly escape an observing reader, even on the most cursory perusal. To those whohave formed for themselves a picture of the world, who have drawn out, from the thousand variablecircumstances of their being, a philosophy of life, it will be interesting and instructive to see how manand his concerns are represented in the first of European minds: to those who have penetrated to thelimits of their own conceptions, and wrestled with thoughts and feelings too high for them, it will bepleasing and profitable to see the horizon of their certainties widened, or at least separated with a firmerline from the impalpable obscure which surrounds it on every side. Such persons I can fearlessly invite tostudy “Meister.” Across the disfigurement of a translation, they will not fail to discern indubitable tracesof the greatest genius in our times. And the longer they study, they are likely to discern them the more

distinctly. New charms will successively arise to view; and of the many apparent blemishes, while a fewsuperficial ones may be confirmed, the greater and more important part will vanish, or even change fromdark to bright. For, if I mistake not, it is with “Meister” as with every work of real and abidingexcellence, the first glance is the least favourable. A picture of Raphael, a Greek statue, a play ofSophocles or Shakspeare, appears insi

Book II Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Book III . The Storm and Stress period in German literature had been succeeded by the Romantic movement, but Goethe's classicism rendered him unsympathetic to it. Nevertheless .